Daddy's Little Killer (42 page)

Johnny pulled me into his chest and hugged
me tightly.  I felt his lips whispering over my hair. 
"Oh honey.  I was afraid this would hit you hard at some
point.  You're safe.  He can't hurt you.  I'm so
sorry that he got as close as he did, but I promise you, it'll
never happen again."

I wanted to laugh.  Of course he would
attribute emotions to me that I didn't feel.  Johnny wanted to
believe I was shaken over the recent attempts on my life. 
It's always easier to let people believe the lie.  I didn't
see that I had any choice at this point.  To correct him would
involve a confession.

The other option felt much better. 
Stand here in his embrace and soak up the comfort offered. 
Sweet lethargy seeped into my bones.  For an insane moment, I
wanted to stay wrapped up in the safety he offered for the rest of
my life.

"I'm calling people I can trust in to do
this.  You need to go home and rest," Orion said. 

"No!"

"Helen, it's all right."

"It isn't all right.  I have to see
this through.  I have to confront him for what he's done to
these women.  Johnny, I'm fine."  I stepped away from
him.  "I'm sorry.  I shouldn't have done that."

"Are you sure?"

No, but I have to pretend to be
certain.  "I'm positive.  Let's end this.  The
sooner we find Lowe's death-mobile, the sooner we can go arrest
him.  He's not going to be content filling in the blanks for
Darnell indefinitely."

Johnny procured bolt cutters from the trunk
of his car.  The miracle was that I didn't find it odd to
carry them around in case of emergency.  He snapped the
industrial sized padlock on the garage door and hefted it high
above our heads.

I shined a flashlight inside.

The term used to describe
this type of camper was a
silver
bullet
.  First constructed in 1936,
the model had become an enduring symbol of luxury camping and life
on the road.  I took a tentative step into the neatly
organized space in the garage and shined the light on the riveted
aluminum body.  The company emblem
Airstream
looked as pristine as the
day it had been applied on an assembly line.  No dings. 
No tarnish.  No discernible wear.  Still, I estimated its
age at minimum of forty years.

"What do you bet that when we open this bad
boy we won't find bunks or booth style seating?"  Orion
asked.

He was right.  Lowe probably gutted and
customized the interior to suit his purposes long ago.  "Ready
to use your bolt cutter on the door?"  A beam of light from my
left hand flashed over the locked door.  "Funny.  He's
got three key-only deadbolts on it, but he chooses to secure with a
padlock while the thing is in storage.  That's arrogance for
you."

The padlock on the twenty-four foot camper
was no match for Orion.  The door opened noiselessly, well
oiled and without a single creak to betray its age. 

"Shine on, Doc."

I stepped closer.  The light bounced
off the opposite wall.  "No dining booth."  I gingerly
stepped up the tiny stairs that descended when the door
opened.  Lowe had indeed gutted the interior.  A
straight-back wooden chair was bolted to the floor.  Iron
rings had been fastened to the walls near the ceiling and
floor.  Next to them hung chains in a variety of
strengths.  I shined the flashlight over them.  Some of
the links appeared to be intentionally weakened.

"He wanted them to fight and gave them every
scrap of hope he could," Orion said.  "What a sick fuck."

At the other end of the camper was a bed,
also bolted to the floor.  It was covered with a rubber
sheet.  "And that makes cleanup a snap," I murmured. 

Orion was rummaging through the single
cabinet in the camper's interior.  "Bowie knives, handcuffs,
empty blood vials, needles and syringes and hello … what have we
here?" 

I shined the light at his
black-gloved hand.  Johnny held a small vial of clear liquid
between thumb and index fingers for my inspection.  I stepped
close and read the label. 
Succinylcholine
.  "How much is
in the cabinet?"

"Just this one vial," Johnny said. 
"Unless you can give me some light to get a better look."

I directed the beam into the confined space,
but he was right.  Only a single vial remained.  "How did
Lowe get his hands on this?  Succinylcholine is highly
controlled."

"You can get anything off the 'net,
Doc.  Sometimes you need to show a prescription or have a DEA
number, but those are a hell of a lot easier to come by than you'd
imagine.  When was the last time you were in a doctor's
office?"

I couldn't recall.

"These doctors leave their prescription pads
laying around.  A shrewd thief doesn't take the whole
pad.  He peels off a quarter or a third of it, and the doctors
are so busy, they don't even notice anything is missing."

"And the thief does what, forges the
doctor's signature?"

"All he has to do is be generally
illegible.  Those online pharmacies aren't all shining
examples of ethics.  They fulfill the technical requirement
under the law, end of responsibility."

"What else is in that cabinet?" I asked.

Orion fished around and pulled out a small
video camera, one of the old ones so popular in the '90s. "You
don't suppose ..."

"Are there tapes?"

He nodded and procured a handful of the
small video cassettes with his other hand. "We should get this
stuff back to OSI before we view it, Helen. You don't have to see
this here."

But I already yanked the camera from his
grasp. My eyes darted around the torture chamber Lowe used for God
only knew how many crimes. My thumb flicked over the power button
on the camera at the same time that I noticed a long screw
protruding through the bottom of a shelf at the far end of the
camper. "There," I said. "He mounted the camera there."

Johnny grunted his disgust. "That's
incredibly stupid, to record the crimes he committed."

"Not when he needs to relive his crime over
and over again, Johnny." I flipped the view screen out from the
camera and pressed play. The scene was somewhat familiar, the
carpeting, the coffee table, but with subtle differences in the
environement from the first time I saw it. Magazines were fanned
out over the surface of the table instead of stacked neatly in
three piles of three. One lay open, the front pages tucked beneath
the back as if the reader had simply been interrupted perhaps to
answer the doorbell and left her magazine open.

"Helen, I don't think we should watch this
here."

I waved him to silence, watched Gwen Foster
back into the frame of the video. She was shaking her head. Tears
streamed from her eyes. Her softly rasped, "no" seemed unnaturally
loud. The man, Lowe, was head to toe in black, his mask in place
over his face.

"Where is the child, Gwen? Did you think you
could really keep her from me after all these years? I want to know
where she is. Does she look like you? Like Brighton? Like your
dearly departed Auntie Gwen?"

A trembling hand clamped over Foster's
lips.

"Helen, please," Johnny murmured as he
crowded my back. "We shouldn't see this here, not like this." His
hand reached for the camera.

I slapped it away with one snarled warning.
"If you don't have the stomach for it, wait outside. I need to know
what happened to her."

Lowe reached for her, the buttons that
peppered the living room floor went flying in vivid motion on the
video. My eyes fluttered shut. I didn't want to see this part,
didn't want to see a woman abused in the worst possible way a
second time. But Lowe's voice still reached my ears and imprinted
Gwen Foster's horror in my brain forever.

"Fight me, Gwen. You know I need it. Fight
me, and end this once and for all. I'll find our daughter ... one
way or another, I'll find her, and she'll never see it coming. Will
she fight me?"

"Christ," Johnny rasped. "He had no idea
that Vinnie was his son."

"He couldn't accept the truth, Johnny," I
said so quietly it was barely audible over Gwen's sobbing. "His
fantasy is everything to him."

I felt the rage radiate from his tense body.
"I can't watch this."

"I need to see who actually killed her."
Another thought occurred to me as the vantage point of the camera
changed. "And someone is taping this for Lowe, Johnny."

Gwen lay stiffly on the floor even after
Lowe finished with her. He sneered a warning not to move, though I
wondered who it was intended for. He disappeared from the frame.
The camera jarred again, came to rest on a steady surface, and my
other suspect came into view.

"I could've been his daughter you know,"
Candy Blevins chuckled. "I'm like him. Fearless. You could never be
my mother, though, all weak and sobbing. Bitches like you make me
sick. He might need the fight to kill you, but I don't. Get
up."

"God, Helen, please shut it off," Johnny
rasped.

I stared at the two by three inch screen,
watching Foster rise so docilely, Blevins produce the garrote and
slip it around Foster's neck. On some level, it didn't surprise me
that Gwen didn't fight. As the life drained out of her already
glassy eyes, I realized something. Lowe had already killed the
person that walked around in Gwen Bennett Foster's body. He
slaughtered her years ago. Last Tuesday was only a formality.

I shuddered. 

"Are you okay?" Johnny asked when I shut the
tape off before Lowe returned from wherever he'd gone.

He couldn't know the
conflict that roiled in my gut, the suddenly alert conscience that
whispered the truth I couldn't deny anymore.
You're no different than they are, Helen. Cold, calculating,
homicidal.
I threw out a red herring
rather than own my guilt. "I'm glad he didn't shoot me up with
succinylcholine the other day.  I could've died very quickly
without medical attention."

"He'll never hurt you or anyone else again,
Helen."  Orion ripped his cell phone out of his pocket and
dialed.  "It's me.  We've got the crime scene on
wheels.  Send the state forensics guys over here, Chris. 
Helen and I will wait for them to arrive, and then I'll deliver her
to OSI so she can suck the truth out of Lowe whether he wants it or
not."

"Darnell?"  I asked.

"Yeah.  Lowe and the others are getting
antsy."

"No doubt."  I paused a moment to
debate whether I should ask something that I noticed throughout the
evening.

"What?"  Orion's mouth slanted downward
and pulled his eyebrows into a V along with it.

"I've noticed that when you talk to Darnell,
you're not really asking for direction.  He's not the head of
OSI, is he?"

"Technically, that would be Governor
Collangelo."

"Practically speaking, Darnell takes orders
from you."

"And you miss nothing when you're paying
attention," he muttered.

"That upsets you?"

"My situation, the success of OSI depends on
my ability to maintain this façade that we created.  Chris is
in charge.  I'm nothing but a pain in the ass ex-cop turned
security specialist."

"So the business isn't legitimate."

"Oh, it is," Johnny said.  "And very
lucrative, and 100 percent mine.  I just have very little to
do with the day to day operations.  Nobody at Security
Specialists has a clue what I'm really doing, and I really need to
keep it that way."

"What do they think?"

He shot a lascivious grin.

"You're kidding.  They think you're out
being a wealthy playboy?"

"And taking on select private investigations
for special clients.  Typically young, wealthy, single
women."

In light of what we'd just seen, his levity
seemed perverse. "You really are a pig."

"Hey, none of my clients would ever claim I
was inappropriate, because I haven't been.  Is it my fault
that the world simply assumes that these women understand
discretion better than most and that I'm too much of a gentleman to
kiss and tell?"

"You're not really a womanizer?"

His grin widened.  "I wouldn't go that
far either."

Really perverse. I stepped out of the camper
and moved to the garage door to wait for the state crime lab to
arrive.  "Won't it look odd if this scene is processed by
OSI?"

"Did I piss you off back there with all that
stuff about –"

"Don't be ridiculous.  I gather that
your precarious situation with staying off the radar is why you
won't be part of Lowe's interrogation either."

"This case is an old wound on Darkwater
Bay.  It's been festering for longer than anybody
realizes.  However, it's the tip of the iceberg where crime is
concerned.  Don't get me wrong.  It's a step in the right
direction, and I'm thrilled that you figured everything out in
short order.  In fact, if I ever wrap my head around how fast
you uncovered what it took me years to find, I'll probably have a
serious bout of insecurity over it."

"That's insane."

"I never thought that there were more murder
victims.  It never occurred to me to scour missing person's
records for girls who resembled Lowe's type.  I'd be very
interested in hearing what prompted you to do that."

"Two things," I murmured absently. 
"The amount of skill demonstrated in Brighton's murder and the
enormous gap in time between when she was killed and Gwen Foster
died.  She was so far outside his preferential norm, I almost
dismissed the connection between the cases."

"So in other words, you thought he was too
proficient with Brighton for it to be his first time."

"Yes."

"And you couldn't believe that someone that
violent could go fifteen years without feeding his addiction."

"Not unless he was dead or incarcerated –
which Foster proved wasn't the case.  I had to believe
incarceration would've been a stressor great enough that he
would've let something slip about other crimes he committed. 
Either way, it ruled out both possibilities."